It started off innocently enough– we feed the hungry, educate the young, promote tolerance and community. Now I am surrounded by an armed militia demanding my head. The people I have paid to protect me are showing breaking signs. I am alone in the greatest office known and am defeated, but I will fight to the end. Always to the end. I guess looking back there was no other way it could have gone. Let me start from the beginning.

I was twenty-six at the time, one of the youngest people elected to congress. I won because I…I’m not sure how I won, but I did. I stood by my principles, and fought to keep a threadbare America together. I remember my family telling me that America has always been the greatest country in the union, an opinion that has been easily refuted since 2020. I believed that it could be the greatest country again if we could all just work together. It was 2076, and I hadn’t had a good nights sleep in years. How do we fix everything? We were elected to fix everything.

Sessions were fighting. Nothing got accomplished and something snapped inside me. I began to believe nothing had ever been accomplished through diplomacy. Nothing would ever be accomplished through diplomacy and a democratic system. I knew better than to tell everyone what I thought. Political suicide was the term most often bandied about.

In the beginning I was branded a revolutionary. I was raising the call to arms for all those who felt like they could finally make a change in the world. In the beginning I had hoped it would be peaceful, but peaceful revolution is naive and I knew that somewhere. America was a petulant child that needed boundaries and lessons. I was that person to teach those lessons. My constituents seemed to agree. Disbanding congress and forcing the president and cabinet out of office was easier than I had thought. Reworking the constitution was more tricky, but I survived. I appointed my own cabinet. We made our own government. America was under construction and a new America would emerge ever glorious.

People didn’t take well to the transition at first. We were now a totalitarian society with me at the top. It was for their own good became my mantra. There was no more private and public. Schools now got to be equally funded and no one could be home-schooled. People were able to eat. Homelessness became almost non-existent. Things were good. People seemed happy.

Then there was a small faction, ten people, who thought differently. They were old heads of the NASDAQ companies missing their wealth and their unbridled corporate influence on politics. I asked them to a meeting. We spoke, I asked them to stand down, I have no interest in violence. I have no interest in hurting people. I had asked my council to stand outside the room while I met with these men. Our meeting I thought was going well. We left amicably. It was a test and I lost. Two weeks later the NASDAQ men attempted to unilaterally eliminate me and my council.

I couldn’t tell you were the line is between non-violence and violence. I crossed it. I felt little shame or regret. Those men were to be made an example. That’s when the public executions began. I’ve heard the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely and didn’t think much of it then. I’ve changed my mind now.

Whomever reads this, I am hiding from death. I have outwitted the reaper many times, but I fear I will not this time. Please know that whatever I did, I did it because it was for everyone’s own good.